SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- Apr 24, 2008 --
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit
organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced
highlights resulting from its second Annual Linux Foundation Collaboration
Summit, which was hosted by IBM in Austin, Texas earlier this month.
Attendance at this year's Summit grew more than 30 percent over last year's
and included leaders from the kernel community, desktop, industry and end
users communities.

"The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit is the only place where key
leaders and stakeholders in Linux come together to discuss the most
important issues facing the operating system," said Jim Zemlin, executive
director at The Linux Foundation. "This year we saw breakthroughs in driver
support for the desktop, IPV6 compliance and virtualization. We feel it's
an important venue for solving cross-industry and cross-community issues."

Highlights from the LF Collaboration Summit include:

-- OEMs rally behind Open Source Drivers. One-third of the Summit
attendees participated in the Linux Foundation's fifth Desktop Architects'
Meeting. In Austin, leading computer manufacturers Dell, HP, Lenovo, and
many others met with the desktop community to collaborate and optimize
Linux for their new desktop and ultra-mobile products. A key result from
the meeting was that these OEM vendors reported that they will encourage
chipset and other component vendors to provide open source drivers for
Linux. The companies announced on stage that they will now include wording
in their hardware procurement processes to "strongly encourage" the
delivery of open source drivers for transparent integration into the Linux
kernel. Asustek Computer, Inc., manufacturer of the popular Linux-based Eee
PC, is also encouraging its hardware suppliers to provide open source
drivers for Linux. VIA Technology also announced the opening of their
drivers and better support for the open source community at the Summit.
-- New Driver Backporting Workgroup. Canonical, Novell, Red Hat, and
others have formed this new workgroup to speed the process for porting new
drivers to older versions Linux. This effort is expected to help solve one
of the most important commercial issues for companies that ship Linux by
improving time-to-market and enabling the automated installation of the
newest drivers on older versions of Linux. While Linux driver support is
the broadest in the world, many commercial companies use older versions of
Linux in their products that don't include the latest driver support. The
Driver Backporting Workgroup will address this issue by implementing a
process that simplifies packaging, distribution and installation of
drivers, including matching the right drivers with different hardware
components. For more details on the Workgroup, please visit:
http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Driver_Backport_Charter
-- Next-generation Internet Compliance (IPv6). At last year's Summit, IBM
identified the IPv6 protocols as an area where immediate collaboration was
required in order for Linux to be primed for the next-generation of the
Internet. This is important because of government purchasing requirements
stipulating this support. Since then, Bull, IBM, HP, Nokia-Siemens, Novell
and Red Hat have made contributions and at this year's Summit in Austin,
the IPv6 work group was able to announce that Linux is IPv6 compliant to
DoD mandated requirements. While there is still work to do to address the
additional emerging requirements, this is a concrete example of vendors
coming together at the Collaboration Summit to solve a pressing issue for
Linux.
-- Linux on Mobile Devices. The Summit hosted for the first time
representatives of all three mobile Linux platforms -- Android, GNOME
Mobile, and LiMo -- on one stage. The groups agreed on the enormous value
of using the Linux kernel to efficiently manage any hardware, but shared
their differing views on which higher-level software components provide the
best environment for developer applications. Representatives from each
platform evaluated the potential of using the multi-million dollar database
and test infrastructure of the Linux Foundation's Linux Standard Base
(LSB), which is available under an open source license as an application
and device compliance solution.
-- Virtualization Mini-Summit. At the Summit, leaders from the various
virtualization projects (Xen, KVM, lguest, VMware, qemu and others) met to
solve issues and collaborate on common objectives. This included work on
interfaces, qemu and the lack of upstream interest in x86 virtualization
specific patches. The result of this meeting will be enhancements to the
virtualization capabilities of Linux.

Also at the Summit, IDC's Vice President of Research, Al Gillen, presented
a new IDC White Paper titled "The Role of Linux Servers in Commercial
Workloads." The white paper, sponsored by The Linux Foundation, outlines
the state of the Linux server market and can be downloaded
at:
http://www.linux-foundation.org/publications/IDC_Workloads.pdf.

Video interviews with Linux and open source leaders at the LF Collaboration
Summit will be available soon on the Linux Foundation events site at
https://www.linux-foundation.org/events/. In addition, real-time video was
taken directly from the Summit and is available at YouTube. See short takes
with Google's Jeremy Allison, The 451 Group's Raven Zachary, Hyperic's
Javier Soltero and others at
www.youtube.com/thelinuxfoundation.

The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit is heralded as the only place
where Linux community developers, distribution and system vendors, ISVs,
and end users meet face-to-face and collaborate. While there are a variety
of industry and developer conferences, the Summit is the only one to bridge
the worlds of community and industry, while allowing end users to access
and influence these two important groups. It is designed to accelerate
collaboration and problem solving in the Linux community by bringing key
stakeholders together in a neutral setting.

About the Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the
growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, the Linux Foundation sponsors the work of
Linux creator Linus Torvalds and is supported by leading Linux and open
source companies and developers from around the world. The Linux Foundation
promotes, protects and standardizes Linux by providing unified resources
and services needed for open source to successfully compete with closed
platforms. For more information, please visit
www.linux-foundation.org.

Trademarks: The Linux Foundation and Linux Standard Base are trademarks of
The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. Third party
marks and brands are the property of their respective holders.